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Design for Manufacturability (DFM) provides an overview of Design for Manufacturing and Assembly (DFMA) techniques, used to minimize product cost through design and process improvements. DFM is open to all mechanical engineering students. Students will work on two major projects during the semester:

1. The first will be a reverse engineering project where students will choose an existing product and determine how it was produced and investigate why certain manufacturing processes were selected based on different DFMA metrics.
2. The second project will be to apply DFMA techniques to a novel product. If DFM is taken as part of the Graduate Design Track, students will use this second project to further develop their design concepts from APD. At the end of the course, students will have a better understanding of how products are made and the economics involved in the manufacturing processes. 

Advanced Product Design (APD) is offered in the fall semester. APD introduces the processes and methods for designing products including need-finding and need-specification, ideation and idea selection, design thinking/user-centered design, human factors, sketching, pretotyping, user feedback, prototyping, intellectual property and product launch. Teams of three to four students will design and build a novel product throughout the semester. We encourage Advanced Product Design students to carry their product concepts forward to MCEN 5045: Design for Manufacturability in the spring semester to take the next step toward a real product launch. 

Advanced Product Design is a pre-requisite for Graduate Design (MCEN 5065, MCEN 5075), a two-semester design experience centered around an industry-sponsored project that includes: problem definition and specifications, determining design requirements, user feedback, alternative design concepts, engineering analysis, concept prototypes, and CAD drawings. 

Note: Enrollment is by application only through the ME department. Please apply through the . 

Graduate Design is taught by multiple design faculty. This two-course sequence is offered in the fall and spring semesters following Advanced Product Design (MCEN 5055) and Design for Manufacturability (MCEN 5045). Graduate Design consists of teams of three to four students working on a design project. The end result of this project is fully tested functional hardware with accompanying documentiation. In many cases, the project hardware will be representative of the final manufactured product.

The projects will come from various sources, such as industry, non-profit organizations, student concept for an entrepreneurship product, technology transfer, corporate grants and more. Past sponsors have included ConMed, Covidien, Terumo BCT, Medtronic, Agilent, Sandia National Labs, Oracle, NIST, Department of Surgery, Department of Neurosurgery and Los Alamos National Lab. Examples of past projects are intellectual property (IP) sensitive. In fact, several patent applications have been filed by industry partners with students as named inventors on these applications and several products have gone into full-scale production. 

While the course focuses on team design projects, formal class time discussions will center on design heuristics, project management, design trends, failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA), entrepreneurship and oral presentation skills. 

Optimal Design of Mechanical Components is a technical elective that applies linear and nonlinear optimization methods to the design of mechanical components and systems. This course also examines unconstrained and constrained optimization as well as the formulation of objective functions, including cost, weight, response time and deflection. Students apply knowledge to gears, springs, cams and linkages.  ​